Other teams have had success by switching to a more up-tempo style, but the Bruins don't plan to change up how they play.

By Dan CagenDaily News staff

May 26, 2014
8:51 p.m.

The Rangers barely play the same sport as the Bruins.

That much was proven Sunday night. The first two regulation goals scored by New York against the Canadiens were taken from the same Usain Bolt template. Carl Hagelin went deep to handle a Brian Boyle pass for a short-handed score in the first period. Derick Brassard's breakaway slap shot came when Dan Girardi went tape-to-tape over most of the Madison Square Garden ice.

Stretch passes to forwards running post patterns for heart-breaking goals. The Rangers won 3-2 in overtime to move within one win of a trip to the Stanley Cup Final.

The Bruins do not emphasize the stretch pass. If Girardi played under Claude Julien, he likely would not have slowly skated the puck up the right boards while looking for the home run pass, and Brassard, as the center, would have circled back towards the defensive zone to lead the breakout.

A year ago, the Rangers wouldn't have been doing that either.

“They play like us, these guys. … They play a heavy game like us,” Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli said in the days leading up to the Bruins' conference semifinal series with the Rangers in May 2013.

Now as the Bruins are playing golf and watching the Rangers play the Habs — the team that ended the Boston hockey season and plays a similarly fast style as the Rangers — there's a thought that the NHL is speeding away from the Big, Bad Bruins style faster than you can say ‘forward leaking out.’

The Bruins have not fared well against Montreal in the last two years. After flaming out in the second round against the Canadiens and knowing they'll more-than-likely face the Habs in the playoffs again next season, it'd be easy to say Chiarelli should be taking close notes during the Eastern Conference finals.

But the Rangers' philosophical change is not an apt comparison to the Bruins. The Blueshirts were aching for a change after the tyrannical John Tortorella era. Tortorella took a fast, skilled roster and told them to block shots and play station-to-station hockey. A team with Brad Richards, Rick Nash, Chris Kreider, Derek Stepan, Brassard and Hagelin did not mesh with Torts, and the coach was kicked to the Manhattan curb.

Alain Vigneault was brought in and changed the way the Blueshirts do things. A collapse by the Penguins and a hot playoff run has New York one win from its first trip to the Stanley Cup Final in 20 years.

But the Bruins' personnel is not built for a similar strategy switch. They won't be making a coaching change, and the roster is not suited to a Vigneault-like makeover. Daniel Paille and Matt Bartkowski are the only true elite skaters on the roster.

The buzz word from the team's brass has been 'tweaks' — a remade fourth line that will more closely resemble the fast and skilled bottom units in Montreal and Chicago, perhaps more puck-movers on the back end — rather than massive reconfigurations.

Had they hit their stride against the Canadiens, not fallen behind by the fourth shift of seemingly every game game, gotten more from their top line and seen more poise from the young defensemen, then the Bruins truly believe they would still be in skates.

“We haven’t fallen off the cliff,” team president Cam Neely said last week. “We didn’t play as well as we needed to play in the second round, and from my perspective, as a group, we didn’t play the way we were playing in March and in April. We still have our core group, aside from maybe [Zdeno Chara], our core group is still relatively young. You’re talking mid- to late-20s, maybe. And Zdeno is still, in my opinion, the best defender in the game. So I still think we’re in our window.

“We just have to recognize what we need to do to make our team better, whether it’s guys playing better or whether we’re adding different players.”

As long as Chara is the sun that the Bruins’ galaxy revolves around, the Bruins won’t change their tenets of hockey. Chiarelli and Julien have a unique force in the sky-scraping Slovakian, and until he stops being a commanding force — and he was this season until the last half of the Montreal series — then it would be counterproductive to go for a go-go approach.

The rest of the roster has been sculpted to play that way as well. Patrice Bergeron, Milan Lucic, Reilly Smith, Carl Soderberg, Dennis Seidenberg and Johnny Boychuk could not operate as well for, say, the Canadiens. Thomas Vanek has been a square peg in a round hole since relocating to Quebec. A change in Spoked-B philosophy is to remove certain names from the dressing room.

It can be done, but not without sacrifices. The Sharks have remodeled in the last two years, playing faster than they used to.

“We’re talking about playing a more north-south game, not slowing it down as much, trying to stay ahead of the curve,” coach Todd McLellan told reporters in the fall. “I think that’s the way the game is going. Where coming out of the last lockout [in 2005] you could delay and look for people and hold on to it a little bit longer, teams have figured out how to defend that now, and you have to advance and try and stay ahead of the curve.”

It was retooling on the fly. Wilson decided the Sharks couldn’t contend anymore with their current core. San Jose took off after the 2013 trade deadline and was a power this season in the take-no-prisoners Pacific Division.

The Bruins are not at that point. They believe their core and its corresponding system can still contend for the Cup, especially in a weak Eastern Conference.

The Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy in win in sports. There are many ways to win it. The Kings and Blues are among those sticking to the path of physicality. The Bruins won't be venturing off that path.

“We don't trade chances," Chiarelli told the Daily News in January. “Trading chances, you don't win if you're always going to trade chances every game. You're not going to trade chances every game. It's a winning formula and we've won with it.”